You may be wondering why we skipped the announcement for version 1.11.14 and branded 1.11.15 as our fifth 1.12 beta in its stead. The truth is, we did plan to release 1.11.14 on May 12th, and even went as far as to tag it in our source code repository, as a few players and coders may have noticed. However, much like with version 1.11.3 and a few others before, some serious regressions were found by the release team shortly after tagging. In light of their impact on the game’s playability, we chose to wait some more time for our developers to fix them and save everyone the trouble of coping with issues of which we were already aware. It Is Ready When It Is Ready is our unofficial motto for a reason, after all!

After amending those bugs and then a few more, we can now publicly announce our fourteenth development release in this series. 1.11.15 packs a generous number of bug fixes and improvements made since 1.11.13, and since a considerable share of them were committed following the failed 1.11.14 attempt, you could say this is a 50% discount release!

Remember that, as it has been the case for all development versions since 1.11.10, a feature and string freeze is in effect to facilitate testing, bug fixing, and translation efforts; although this beta does not include any new features for this reason, we still need your help to ensure the best possible quality for the upcoming Wesnoth 1.12.0 stable release:

Players should test this and later beta versions and all the various new features and units added since 1.10.x for single-player and multiplayer games.

Content authors should port their content to these versions and test it now to ensure first-time players of version 1.12.0 — or Wesnoth in general — have a chance to play with their favorite add-ons when the time comes.

Translators should work on translating mainline Wesnoth and try to aim for 100% completion before 1.12.0, which is expected to become available within a couple of months eventually. Players with the required language skills can also help — all the instructions to contribute to the mainline translation teams are in the wiki.

Everyone willing to test this beta release should report any bugs they encounter, be they issues found during normal gameplay, or when working with WML or Lua for add-on content. Every properly-filed bug report is useful to us, no matter how trivial or obvious the issue may seem to be.

Typos in the English text of the game should also be reported in the wiki so they can be amended as soon as possible.

Here is a list of the most important changes since the last development release:

gfgtdf and iceiceice have been hard at work fixing bugs affecting multiplayer and replay synchronization, multiplayer campaigns, and more exotic MP scenario configurations! Unfortunately, due to an oversight this resulted in breaking compatibility with previous versions again, particularly due to WML syntax improvements and fixes for existing unintended or unspecified engine behavior. We apologize for the inconvenience of this.

Following discussions with mainline and UMC developers who had concerns about changes in 1.11.x regarding the frequency with which the engine checks the victory conditions of a scenario, the solution previously included in 1.11.13 has been revamped.

The fight_on_without_leader=<boolean> attribute of [side] tags has been replaced with defeat_condition=always|no_leader_left|no_units_left|never. The default value is no_leader_left, thus preserving backwards compatibility.

For grammatical cohesion, the remove_from_carryover_on_leaders_loss attribute introduced in 1.11.7 has been renamed remove_from_carryover_on_defeat.

In 1.11.15 and forward, Wesnoth checks for victory/defeat of sides more or less at the end of any player action that is synchronized over the network (non-undoable moves, attacks, recruits, WML-defined menu item actions, and so on); this is to say, not only at the end or start of a turn, but also at the end of moveto events and similar. It will not interrupt an attack to end the game, and it will not check in between two events invoked by the same player action, but you should assume it will check more frequently.

Please note, there is NO backwards compatible support in the engine for these syntactic changes, breaking compatibility with Wesnoth versions 1.11.7 – 1.11.14.

The victory check process is simple: for each non-empty side (a side for which the controller attribute is not empty), Wesnoth will check its defeat condition according to the units currently on the map. Then, if any two non-defeated sides are enemies, the game will proceed. Also, in the case that victory_when_enemies_defeated is false, and there is a not-defeated human-controlled side, the game will proceed. Otherwise, the game will end.

The majority of campaigns will work exactly the same as before, and in many very simple cases the engine now works better than before. However, if some scene in your campaign does not work properly anymore because you were removing all the units, or expecting that they would not be removed from carryover when their side was defeated, we expect that you now have all the tools you need to make it work, by setting sides to be “never defeated” before removing all their units, or toggling remove_from_carryover_on_defeat, etc.

As reported on the forums, previous releases were affected by a color format issue on OS X and other platforms where loaded images might not be in the format expected by the game engine. This bug (#22045 [Gna.org]) is solved in this release.

The MP server has trouble with players of type Local in campaigns. It has been decided to postpone dealing with this. In the meantime, you might try assigning such sides to the host, or running multiple instances of Wesnoth (bug #21965 [Gna.org]).

Start-of-scenario saves from multiplayer campaigns are currently bugged and cannot be loaded. This also affects start-of-scenario saves from multiplayer scenarios that have progressed to other scenarios by means of [endlevel], even if they are not defined as MP campaigns (bug #22068 [Gna.org]).

As usual, there are many more changes in addition to the aforementioned, including translation updates and fixes for recent and long-standing issues. Most of these items are listed in the full changelog. There’s also an alternative players changelog including only those changes deemed to be relevant for regular players. Finally, an announcement including a list with the most notable changes between 1.10 and 1.12 will be made available along with the 1.12.0 release when it is ready.

New Contributors

Do you want to help shape the future of Wesnoth? You are always free to join us in the #wesnoth-devIRC channel on irc.freenode.net to ask for help with getting started!

The Windows, OS X, and OpenPandora packages are already available and can be found on the Download page in the wiki.

All known Linux packagers have been contacted, and binaries for your distribution may have already been created. Information about where to get the respective binaries or how to install them can be found on the Linux binaries page in the wiki.

Downloads for other platforms may be found on the Download page in the wiki as they become available.

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The multiplayer server for 1.11.15 is up and running. This server can be used to play with other players running 1.11.15 and later 1.11.x and 1.12.x versions, unless a future bug fix requires raising the version requirements again.

The add-ons server for 1.12.x is already running. It was started for 1.11.10 and it will serve all future beta and RC releases from this series, as well as all releases in the stable 1.12.x series. If you encounter any problems involving add-ons not working as expected, please notify the content’s author or maintainer.

If you find any bugs, do not hesitate to report them, but please read the instructions on how to report bugs first! As bug reports in the forums tend to be forgotten, you will get better results using our bug tracker. We require your help for finding and fixing issues, no matter how obvious, trivial or complicated they seem!

It seems that "Skip AI moves" has become a bit too aggressive: now the enemy units vanish permanently as soon as they move! You have to deselect the option in preferences and save/reload to bring them back.

you can bring back a classic theme in the theme menu, but that only effects the scenario play veiw, not the dialogs.

Scenario with Robots SP scenario (1.11/1.12), allows you to build your units with components, PYR No preperation turn 1.12 mp-mod that allows you to select your units immideately after the game begins.

shadowm wrote:From what fabi told me, the classic theme was committed to master (1.13.0-dev), but it can’t be backported to 1.12 until version 1.12.0 is released.

do you know the reason ?

Scenario with Robots SP scenario (1.11/1.12), allows you to build your units with components, PYR No preperation turn 1.12 mp-mod that allows you to select your units immideately after the game begins.

Looks like villages flag image layer have changed from 1.10 versions. Now when I place a image on same hex with [set_item] the flag image is covered, wich is a behavior different from 1.10 and I find it undesired.

Be aware English is not my first language and I could have explained bad myself using wrong or just invented words.World Conquest II

Crow_T wrote:Is there a way to make the middle mouse scrolling behave as it did in the 1.10.x versions? It's kind of, I don't know, mushy now.

I am the person responsible for the change there. Before the middle click scrolling seemed to me and a couple of others to be a bit hard to control. I changed it so that it is more like the Firefox middle click scrolling. This should make it easier to be more precise and if you want to scroll quickly like before you would move the cursor away from the point where you clicked and wait for it to scroll. Maybe it needs a cursor whilst scrolling at the point where the middle click was made?

Out of interest Crow_T, did you actually use the 1.10 middle click scrolling when playing?

beetlenaut wrote:It seems that "Skip AI moves" has become a bit too aggressive: now the enemy units vanish permanently as soon as they move! You have to deselect the option in preferences and save/reload to bring them back.